Neoconservative intellectuals and the limitations of governing The Reagan administration and the demise of the Cold War

Abstract

During the 1970s, the then-emerging 'neoconservatives' promoted a foreign policy of aggressive containment of the Soviet Union. Many of these neocons were subsequently appointed to the Reagan administration; however, despite the apparent ideological convergence between Reagan and the neoconservatives, his administration did not constitute an opportunity for them to fully implement their foreign policy vision. Their underlying principles were more rigid and absolutist than those of Reagan and rejected any kind of compromise. In contrast, Reagan's strategy had a pragmatic side to it, favouring agreements with Moscow on certain issues. This limited the contribution neoconservatives could make to policy and many of them became quickly disillusioned with Reagan.     

William Blake and America: Freedom and Violence in the Atlantic World

Abstract

In this article, I consider the absence of a general readership of William Blake's poetry in nineteenth-century Britain and compare that neglect to the American Transcendentalists' reading of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) in the 1840s. The American interest in Blake's poetry is complemented by his fascination with the events in the Atlantic World in the years culminating in the American War of Independence. I will offer a reading of Blake's America: a Prophecy (1793) showing that the Civil War fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict. This is developed first by considering Ralph Waldo Emerson's changing responses to slavery and race during the turbulent middle decades of the century, and then by addressing Walt Whitman's attempt to negotiate postbellum America. This negotiation, I argue, results in the emergence of those two powerfully conflicting strains in his mature poetry: emancipatory fervour and simultaneous despair at the violence intrinsic in liberty.     

Internationalizing the US Ethnic Canon: Revisiting Carlos Bulosan

Abstract

The quasi-autobiographical writing of Carlos Bulosan, a migrant farmworker from the US colony of the Philippines from the 1930s to the 1950s, was discovered by ethnic activists during the US Civil Rights struggles. Once adopted as canonical texts in the US academy from the 1980s on, Bulosan's radical edge was blunted in critical readings of his work, his subversive tendencies sanitized to promote a conformist multiculturalism. We need to recover a submerged decolonizing strand in the history of Filipino deracination, sedimented in Bulosan's testimonies. This essay seeks to excavate those oppositional impulses in Bulosan's works by re-contextualizing them in the anti-colonial revolutionary movement of Filipinos dating back to the revolution of 1896; to the Filipino-American War together with the peasant insurgencies during the first three decades of US occupation (1899–1935); and in the popular-front mobilization during the US Great Depression up to the onset of the Cold War. Re-situated in their historical-biographical milieu and geopolitical provenance, Bulosan's oeuvre acquires immediacy and resonance.     

'War Is Not a Map': Irish America,Transnationalism, and Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls

Abstract

This essay argues for a transnational reading of Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls (2007). It contends that O'Connor's revisiting of the period of the American Civil War and its aftermath begs all sorts of questions regarding Ireland and Irish America's historical and contemporary transnational intercessions and responsibilities. As Ireland underwent a period of unparalleled economic prosperity beginning in the mid-1990s, which most commentators attribute to successive Irish governments' commitment to globalization, it began to face new and pressing challenges in relation to its involvement with the rest of the world, particularly with regard to its stance on neutrality and recent immigrants to Ireland. I conclude that Redemption Falls reveals the complexity of Irish and Irish Americans' relationship to notions of whiteness and (racial) innocence and challenges readers to consider how Ireland will conduct its future relations with the global community both within and beyond its borders.     

正视历史 探索前行——[俄]达旗升《1900年满洲的俄中战争》评介

俄罗斯学者对义和团运动期间的中俄战争一直关注不够,1996年出版的达旗升的《1900年满洲的俄中战争》是填补空白的重要著作。达旗升对这次战争的历史背景和具体进程做了详尽、准确的研究。他利用大量俄方档案,综合运用马克思主义、多元素平衡理论以及后现代理论等理论方法,客观展示了1900年中俄战争的全貌,揭示出这次战争对中俄两国的重大影响,指出了这次战争的性质是俄国蓄谋发动的侵华战争。达著的不足之处是对中方资料和成果的借鉴不够。     

'More Than Just a Hill of Beans': Contested Landscapes in John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War

Abstract

The American Southwest is often considered to be a harsh and unforgiving environment, yet it remains an area where indigenous communities have lived for centuries and since being opened up as a tourist destination in the late nineteenth century has witnessed an incredible growth of major urban conurbations. It is a fragile environment coming under increasing pressure and nowhere is this more apparent than in the competition for scarce water resources. Water issues remain high on the political agenda and the threat to small scale acequia farming is under intense pressure from larger agribusiness. This essay, which adopts an ecocritical perspective, revisits John Nichols' 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War , analysing his literary strategies as he explores the ramifications of differing interpretations of land use on the contested landscapes of New Mexico.     

'If we only had some of what they have' Ralph Ellison in Wales

Abstract

During his period as a merchant marine in the Second World War, the African American novelist Ralph Ellison was stationed in Swansea, Wales. His short story 'In a Strange Country', collected in Flying Home and Other Stories (1998), is based on these Welsh experiences, and there are two other unpublished Welsh-based stories among the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress: 'A Storm of Blizzard Proportions' and 'The Red Cross at Morriston, South Wales'. This article considers these stories as a basis for exploring the cultural and historical connections and correspondences between African Americans and the Welsh. In drawing inspiration from Ellison's critical writings, the article seeks to substantiate a genuinely comparative, transatlantic approach to literary and cultural texts. This approach leads to an exploration of the ways in which the diversity of the Welsh experience – manifested in language, politics and cultural practice – led Ellison to meditate in new ways on the issues of race, nationhood and identity that he would later famously address in Invisible Man.     

War memories across the Pacific: Japanese visitors at the Arizona Memorial

Abstract

This article investigates Japanese visitors' experiences of the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, based on results gained from fieldwork observations, questionnaires, and personal interviews. Japanese visitors tend to understand the memorial and interpret its significance quite differently from the majority of US visitors. Nonetheless, the memorial clearly functions as a site for enhancing national consciousness for Japanese as well as US visitors, as they become acutely aware of their difference from Americans and in so doing reconfirm their own sense of national identity. While the Japanese understanding of the memorial serves to de-Americanize the significance of one of the most recognized national landmarks in the United States, it simultaneously reinforces the site's function as a national memorial by crystallizing a sense of difference based on national identities and encouraging a historical understanding based on a nationalist framework.     

The Literary Front of the Cold War: John Steinbeck as an Ideological Object in the Eastern Bloc

Abstract

The paper examines the ideological dimension of the reception of John Steinbeck in three post-communist countries, namely Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Slovenia. It discusses the prevalent mode of the writer's interpretation in the Eastern bloc which was governed by the political doctrines of the time. It is therefore often Steinbeck's politics, in the narrow sense of the word, that is scrutinized in the prefaces, afterwords, and reviews of his writings. The literary values are either marginalized or wholly ignored. Consequently, Steinbeck's criticism is determined by political correctness. It fails to consider the complexities of his work and treats the writer as an expedient object employed in the ideological campaign on the literary front.     

Freedom,necessity, judgement Trilling,Arendt and '9/11 liberalism'

Abstract

This article examines the thought of Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling in order to explore some core ideas crucial to past and present framings of liberal politics. More specifically, their interpretations of Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd are situated in their cold war context and the strengths and limits of each are discussed. This context – and the place of Arendt's and Trilling's Melville-inspired understandings of the notions of 'freedom', 'necessity' and 'judgement' within it – are then finally pressed into the service of an analysis of contemporary political questions. The article closes by arguing that the predicament of contemporary liberalism is, given some of the moral and political issues raised since 9/11, in some ways analogous to that confronted by the 'Cold War liberalism' associated with Arendt and Trilling. The intelligence, perspective and appreciation of complexity that characterize their work provide an example that liberals, whatever their position on the 'war on terror', can ill afford to ignore.